Success Stories

Overview

RipTrails, an online GPS trail sharing community, needed a free utility to allow its users to download GPS track logs and upload them to their account. GRip (short for GPS Rip) is a Microsoft Windows application that communicates with your GPS and helps you visualize, edit and organize your trails.

This is where the VCF has helped us tremendously.
We initially wrote several trial versions using other toolkits. None of
these had the flexibility we desired in a Windows environment. We
sought something that would have an interface independent of the
operating system and that was open-source and object-oriented. So in
August 2004, we downloaded the VCF and began development.

We
found two aspects of the VCF particularly helpful. First, the software
is incredibly usable. A cornucopia of examples accompanies the initial
installation to help begin development of a project or a feature. The API
is easily accessible, with plainly organized functions, event handlers,
etc. Second, although the VCF is under development, it has been
complete enough to meet our extensive needs. Most of the fundamentals
have been developed for the Windows environment.

Our software utilizes several custom-built controls to facilitate our specific needs. Custom labels use LaTeX markup, and text controls check the validity of entry-data. Displays using OpenGL
provide the user with 3-D graphics that allow a custom design of
certain parts of extruder instrumentation. A visualization control with
the Visualization Tookit
(VTK), a scientific visualization package, facilitates interaction with
final results. All of these were seamlessly built upon the VCF’s
extensible and open-source architecture.

Help forums assist us
in answering pressing questions and in designing newly-needed features.
Countless times, we have suggested small extensions of the VCF that
would help us, and each time, our suggestions have been heeded.
Whenever a bug in the code arrives (which is extremely rare, only a
couple times in our year-long experience), a quick-fix is always
provided on the CVS via the forums.

As a whole, we have been
quite pleased in our experience with VCF. As our software begins its
public releases in July and August 2005, we can only hope that our
industrial and academic clientele will be as satisfied with our product
as we are with the VCF.